Speed run of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (PC version) in 10 segments, completed on January 2 2006. Available in three versions: low/normal/high quality DivX.

Author's comments:
When I thought of speedrunning a Harry Potter game this was the game that came to mind, but then I figured I should try and beat them in order. I never knew how frustrating it would be to get Chamber of Secrets to record. It took a little bit of time and thinking to finally get my pc to hookup into the vcr and then to the tv. I had to do it this way because Fraps hates this game.

When I finally got to record I was amazed as to how many things you don't have to do. You never have to collect any stars and I don't. I also wanted to find several shortcuts. I originally was going to run American McGee's Alice and I actually did a few levels. However, I'm very glad that I didn't do it because the person who did found shortcuts that I knew I would've never found.

I'm incredibly excited that I found as many shortcuts as I did. Just to be in a mind-set of trying to find shortcuts is a very interesting thing. I would play one challenge many, many times and then finally wonder if I could do something. It wasn't until about my 40th time playing through the Rictusempra challenge that I wondered if I could just leap across the gap near the end. I've only done a couple of speedruns but I think that this one is my closest to optimization.

* Segment 1: Near the end of the challenge I found my first shortcut...and as I already mentioned, it's jumping over a gap. If you collect enough beans you get to go into sort of a bonus round. I end up going even though I didn't intend to collect as many beans as I did. If someone else can do this challenge and not get into the bonus round, there's a good 30 secs.-1 minute you can save. I lost a bit of time at the end shooting the turtle things over the edge to raise the platform. For many tries I ignored the first turtle to the right of the entrance and just went up and then 1 or more wouldn't fall all the way down and the platform wouldn't come up. I don't lose much time.

* Segment 2: The bean bonus round is at the start. This is an incredibly dumbed down version of Quidditch. You chase after the snitch automatically...which doesn't add much to the interactive aspect of it. Near the end of the segment is my next shortcut. Instead of going into another room and moving a block so that this scale stays in the right position, I just jump over to the ledge, saving quite a bit of time. Also, I have no idea how I got the other time in this challenge.

* Segment 3: The Malfoy duel could've gone a lot better. About halfway through you see a strategy where I shoot and it looks like to should miss him, but then he goes right into an then back to where he was at. It sort of glitches so that he goes back and forth. I wish I could've done that for the whole duel, and in one practice run I was able to beat him in about 15 seconds. This time it didn't work so well. At around the 14 minutes mark you'll see a pink wall on the left. This is the least glitchy it got in this room. Several times the whole place was covered in pink and I had to guess where I was going. Thankfully, it wasn't that bad this time. No shorcuts in this area. Ho hum.

* Segment 4: Several unskippable cutscenes. A shortcut about halfway through is when I jump down to a sofa instead of going through the hole in which there was a spider web. I started getting low fps later on...but that was the only part. Yeah, I know. This isn't Quake 4...but it does eat a lot of memory.

* Segment 5: The Spongify challenge. No shortcuts...but I save time by casting spongify on the ground before I land quite a bit.

* Segment 6: A shortcut at the start of the forest and me jumping from the left side straight down to the middle instead of jumping over to the other side. A mistake happens a ways into the forest where I try to jump but I didn't quite make it.

* Segment 7: The spider battle. I played this one too many times. I just kept running in the beginning and I lost a little health later on but not too bad.

* Segment 8: You notice these segments are getting shorter and shorter? I made this a segment because I would always do this one really well and then botch up the next part, so I made it segment 9.

* Segment 9: The shortest segment and it's all because of the jump in the beginning. I missed this jump so many times. In the end...I had to jump on the platform a little to the right just so I could miss that pixie in the air. Stupid pixie.

* Segment 10: There were going to be 11 segments, but then I did the 11th segment wrong, realized that I didn't have my save there, but I had my save for this segment. I played it once, and when I got to the cut-off for segment 10/11 I figured I might as well keep going. I kept doing well and got through the last boss battle with very little health. The 4 fire crabs/turtles were so hard at first that it made me want to quit the whole thing. It's amazing now that those 4 and the end boss are in the same segment.

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